Re: csh-considered-harmful is a lintian warning??

[dark@xs4all.nl (Richard Braakman)]

Herbert Xu wrote:
> 	Surely this kind of religious zeal should not be reflected in lintian.

I have no particular opinion about the use of csh for scripts, and I
hope to stay out of the actual policy discussion.  But since I'm the
one who wrote the actual csh-considered-harmful check for lintian, I
guess I should explain my position.  (I believe it is shared by
Christian Schwarz, but of course I cannot speak for him.)

This check is not the first one I came across that I knew might be
controversial.  I decided to implement such checks anyway.  There
are two reasons for this:

1. Lintian was designed to check packages for policy compliance.
If the policy is wrong, then it should be changed, and lintian will
follow suit.  Modifying lintian to ignore part of the policy manual is
bad, because it leaves us with an inaccurate policy.  (Either that or
it leaves a controversial part of policy undiscussed, which is also
bad in my opinion.)

2. I should not judge policy myself.  I should leave that to the
denizens of this list.  (And on the other hand, I do not want to start
a policy discussion about every tag that I think might be
controversial.  I'll leave that to the maintainers who actually
controverse.)

Thus, I do think that if there is religious zeal in the policy manual,
it should be reflected in lintian.

Note that I will be happy to add overrides for the warnings that
lintian gives for your packages if you send the exact tags to
lintian-maint@debian.org.  The whole idea of warnings is that the
maintainer can determine that they are harmless and can override them.
In the csh-considered-harmful case, an obvious reason would be that
the upstream package comes with csh scripts and is not going to
change.

> I'm at a loss at explaining how it even made it to our policy.
> Hence I propose it be both removoed from the policy and lintian.

I'm going to stay out of that part of the discussion :)

Richard Braakman


--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-policy-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org